Dawn French on the torture her latest role imposed on her 'spherical' body

Thursday 10 January 2008 22:57 BST

Dawn French knew something was amiss as soon as she walked into the make-up room.

In front of the mirror, where normally there would be a plethora of pots, tubes and brushes, was one lonely, half-filled tub of foundation cream.

"And that was my lot," says Dawn.

"Normally you look for a bit of 'help' when you sit down in the make-up chair. But it wasn't there this time.

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Dawn French on BBC's Lark Rise To Candleford

"For Lark Rise To Candleford, I, and the other actresses who play the women of Lark Rise, had virtually no make-up on at all. Which was quite right for the Victorian, working class characters we were playing but - if I may say so - remarkably brave on our parts, don't you think?

"Especially knowing that we were going to be in high definition on the nation's TV screens!"

Dawn's face is not the only part of her body that is set to receive national exposure, when the adaptation of Flora Thompson's semiautobiographical novels begins on BBC1 on Sunday.

There are also her famously heaving bosoms, threatening to burst forth from her character Caroline Arless' low-cut frocks.

"Blame the corsets for that," grins Dawn, who appears in the adaptation alongside - among others - Julia Sawalha and Liz Smith.

"They tend to push everything up! Too far up? Well I can't help that. I am entirely spherical in shape so the corsets had quite a big job to do.

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Hit show: Dawn French starred as the Vicar of Dibley

"But there is something delicious about wearing corsets, something rather nice about being pulled rigidly into position by them, even if they do seem to push parts of one's body into the most remarkable places.

"Julia (Sawalha) is slim anyway but, by the end of filming, her waist had virtually gone. Take her corset off and she'd probably have found the squeezed-out bits in her socks."

Joking apart, there is a paradox at work here. On the one hand, Dawn is exposing parts of her Rubenesque body to the nation, in a ten-part story, based on the trilogy by Flora Thompson, of life in the fictional Oxfordshire communities of Lark Rise and its posh neighbouring market town Candleford at the end of the 19th Century.

On the other, she is slipping from the acting limelight, appearing in ensemble projects these days, rather than taking - or at least sharing - centre stage as she did in TV series The Vicar Of Dibley and French And Saunders.

She plays one of 15 main characters in Jennifer Saunders' sitcom Jam And Jerusalem, currently on BBC1, and one of 17 in Lark Rise To Candleford.

Is this a deliberate move on her part or is she simply unable to resist the lure of the (relatively minor) roles on offer?

"Quite deliberate. I didn't want to appear in a series which was all about just a few main characters. It gives me the chance to observe, to learn things from other actors. No, delete the word learn - steal, from other actors!"

Dawn, 50, hardly needs to turn thief. She's been acting on TV since the 1980s and even has previous experience of bringing a buxom, Victorian woman to life, appearing as Mrs Crupp in a small-screen version of Charles Dickens' David Copperfield in 1999.

What Mrs Crupp didn't have, though, was a family of four children with another one on the way.

Did playing a mum, in Lark Rise To Candleford, make Dawn feel at all broody?

"I think maternal is probably a better word for it," she says.

"I certainly felt that towards my 'children'. The youngsters playing the parts of my character's offspring were quite wary of me when we started filming, but, by the end, we genuinely loved each other. We became more and more like a family.

"As for being pregnant, well that was interesting. Special padding was added, the more pregnant Caroline became, but I have a head start on other actresses. I have my own fat suit, my own fat tummy, that I can bring along to filming."

Today Dawn is wearing pin-striped black trousers and a black blouse with a frilly collar.

"She is in a jolly mood and her gag-cracking - mostly about her weight - contrasts sharply with the sombre remarks she made in an interview last year, in which she said: "I don't think I'll be around for a long time."

So is this the real reason why she is edging away from the limelight, taking on parts in ensemble dramas as she quietly slips from our consciousness ahead of a twilight existence in the West Country?

Absolutely not, says Dawn.

It's true that she, her funnyman husband of 23 years, Lenny Henry, and their daughter Billie, 16, have moved from their home in Shinfield, near Reading in Berkshire, to a large 19th-century property in Cornwall, but she hasn't gone there to die. At least not yet.

"I hope it will be our last move but that's because I hope we will stay there for a very long time. I like the idea of being settled in one particular house. So, yes, I have moved to Cornwall to die - but hopefully not for many years!

"My granny is 99 years old, my other granny was 95, when she died, so I'm confident of being around for some time to come."

What about another rumour surrounding Dawn, the one about her being drawn, irresistibly, to TV projects set in the countryside?

First there was the quintessentially English Vicar Of Dibley, which ran for 11 years, then came Jam And Jerusalem, set in the fictional West Country village of Clatterford, and now comes Lark Rise To Candleford, a yesteryear take on English, rural life.

Purely coincidental, she says.

"If you're looking for a reason why I'm attracted to particular projects then it's more to do with the thought of there being a proper, beating heart at the centre of them.

"That beating heart was there in Bill Gallagher's scripts, for Lark Rise To Candleford, and, having seen the first episode, I'm delighted to say that it is there on screen, too."

The hearts of the BBC executives in charge of production, on the £5million project, may well have been beating rather too quickly for their own good during filming of the series last summer and autumn.

To describe work on the project as jinxed is perhaps an overstatement, but it was certainly problematical.

There was a foot-and-mouth outbreak, which meant a scene, in which a pig was due to be killed and eaten by the villagers of Lark Rise, had to be scrapped. And then there was the flatulent horse, who when filming a certain scene would break wind, very lengthily and very loudly.

And while we all endured a wet and cold British summer, not everyone-was visited by a tornado or deluges of rain that washed away an entire street and plaster, too, from half-built houses.

And the BBC even went to the trouble of purchasing the crop of wheat, in the field adjacent to the set of Lark Rise, painstakingly cutting it in exactly the way Oxfordshire villagers would have done more than 100 years earlier.

In Lark Rise To Candleford, the character saddled with increasingly large debts is Dawn French's funloving Caroline.

Caroline is by far the most controversial character in Lark Rise.

Her husband Walter has gone away to sea, leaving her to care for her brood, but she doesn't let it get her down.

She may not have much money but what she has she spends in style - treating herself to barrels of beer and steak dinners for the family on pay day, even if her children have to live on bread and dripping for the rest of the week.

Some of her neighbours may disapprove of Caroline's reckless behaviour but, because of her charm and genuine love for her children, they usually end up digging deep to help her .

"I am a vibrant character. Caroline has a lust for life and for her husband who is away at sea.

"She drinks too much, laughs too much and sings too much. But she loves her family very much, and she just goes over the top sometimes.

"They scrabble for every penny but they do share and the Lark Rise community really look out for each other. My character's forever at someone's door borrowing bread. Flora Thompson describes that in the book as part of community life, everything is used again and again."

Caroline's passion for alcohol is a key problem and, towards the end of the series, viewers will see a far darker storyline to the ones in the opening episode, as Caroline is removed to a debtors' prison.

Dawn says: "I know what it's like to struggle for cash. When I went to drama school, I worked as a chambermaid to make ends meet. In fact, Jennifer and I worked in the same hotel."